The Ultimate Business Machine - Archives

Time Compression

Success with spamassassin, too. So it is possible to install spamassassin on one Mac, get logGen to determine precisely which files came in with the installation, copy over just these files to the right places in another Mac, and get that other Mac to run spamassassin, too. The difference being that, for that other Mac, you don't have to go through the download-build-and-install cycle again. And you don't need it to have the Developer Tools installed, so it can be any standard Mac.

Time saved? A typical download-build-install cycle can take about two hours. I made a mistake today and ended up using close to four hours debugging it - you can never get all the steps right because we're only human.

And, if you don't know how to do it, and need to figure all these out from scratch, it can take almost forever.

So we've come from forever, to four hours, to two hours, to half an hour - i.e., if I'm just manually copying the required files to the right locations (which I've packed and marked as to where they should go). Now, if I put all these into a script, it can be done in seconds. From days to seconds.

This was how the first version of Sendmail Enabler got done - I was fed up with always forgetting a step here or a step there whenever I have a to set up a mail server but I don't set up mail servers often enough to want to stick this in my head. Plus they're all so boring.

I'm reading "Education for a Bright Future - The Goals of the Kumon Method of Education" by Hiroshi Kumon, the son of the founder of Kumon. And I was thinking about how this could be what his father meant by arithmetic training being the foundation of all other skills. I'm wondering if the idea for doing what I've just done didn't come from the ability to see AB + AC + AD = A(B + C + D). Like A being the copying process and B+C+D being the sum of all the installations and we can just take the final state and use it in all our subsequent transformations.